Yea, but PC's are a smaller, limited market. I dropped out about 10 years ago, and there were games then that took forever to come out on PC that had been out for a year or more on consoles. Superior hardware does you no good if they don't make games for it.

Steve Zodiac:Yea, but PC's are a smaller, limited market. I dropped out about 10 years ago, and there were games then that took forever to come out on PC that had been out for a year or more on consoles. Superior hardware does you no good if they don't make games for it.

They make games for it. Lots of them. But consoles are quite a lot cheaper and do a pretty good job of being perfectly fun.

I'll say what I said last time we did this: PC markets will never die because games like Crusader Kings will never work on consoles, and there's plenty of market for grand strategy games.

Relatively Obscure:JUST got my first PC that could qualify as high..ish.. end. It's lovely, but the price tag was not.

Did you buy it assembled or build it yourself? I have an 8GB RAM system, 1GB GeForce 460 SE card, and a 6 core, 3.2GB processor. Admittedly the RAM is a bit slower, I think it's 1333 RAM, but I still only spent 1K on all that.

"We used Moore's Law," Yerli said. "If you predict how hardware evolves at the current speed of evolution, and then take consumer pricing evolution, already two years ago you could see, whatever launches in 2013 or 2014 or 2015, will never beat a PC again."

Moore's Law is just a observation of the exponential growth in the number transistors in a IC historically; it says nothing about nothing the future, it's not a physical law.

I'd rather wait 10 minutes for a game to install on my Playstation then spend an hour tracking down drivers. At least I can do it unattended and do something productive while I wait, like whack off or something.

The problem being price for one show me a $299 PC that can run a game that looks as good as the PS3 version. And two, developers know exact hardware they are developing for 100% of the time, they can optimize coding.

Besides PC games aren't really fun or innovative most of the time. OOHHH ANOTHER FPS!!! YEAH!! *yawn*

My graphics card alone cost more than my 360. If the whole PC didn't out-perform the console I'd be hard pressed to spend that kind of money.That being said. If they'd let me use mouse+keyboard on a console game I'd still switch in a heartbeat. My hate for console controllers is pretty much what keeps me in the PC sphere.

Relatively Obscure:Given the price difference between "high end PCs" and consoles, I don't know why that shouldn't be the case.

/JUST got my first PC that could qualify as high..ish.. end. It's lovely, but the price tag was not.

I've bought video cards that cost more than an entire console. I gave up on the PC arms race.

I do have a pretty powerful laptop, but with most PC games going either the MMO route or sort of Diablo III style online deal, the days I could fire it up anywhere, even deployed to a third-world country, and use it as a completely self-contained gaming* unit are numbered.

GAT_00:Did you buy it assembled or build it yourself? I have an 8GB RAM system, 1GB GeForce 460 SE card, and a 6 core, 3.2GB processor. Admittedly the RAM is a bit slower, I think it's 1333 RAM, but I still only spent 1K on all that.

I was going to assemble it myself originally (I can and have, but.. I can't say I specifically LIKE to), but I decided against it when I found a model with a price point maybe 100 bucks over what parts cost without really hunting or waiting for deals, with a better wiring job than my lazy ass would ever manage and a three year warranty/lifetime support (haven't used it, but I've heard positive things about it). Very similar to what I was planning to build anyway; the case is different but fine, but it does sadly lack an SSD I'll have to throw in myself. So, I went the easy route. It's not super high-end and the price was okay for what it was (especially after a couple of discounts from them and $150 off from a deal from my CC company). Just still notably more expensive than the budget systems I've owned previously.

clancifer:"Yerli said what could be packed into a $2,000 or $3,000 high-end PC should have no trouble besting what Sony or Microsoft put into a mass market machine with a more consumer-friendly price point."

Yeah, fark that. I'll stick with my 360.

No kidding. It's almost as if they don't understand the point of consoles.

Bought a HP high-end machine a couple years ago. If you know anything about HPs, you know they are severely underpowered - damn thing came with a 150W p/s...I swapped that out with a nice Corsair, bought a decent video nVidia, boosted the RAM to 16GB and I'm laughing.

dillenger69:My graphics card alone cost more than my 360. If the whole PC didn't out-perform the console I'd be hard pressed to spend that kind of money.That being said. If they'd let me use mouse+keyboard on a console game I'd still switch in a heartbeat. My hate for console controllers is pretty much what keeps me in the PC sphere.

I had a converter that let you use a mouse and keyboard for the xBox 360 when it first came out. It doesn't help. Since console programmers know they are programming for consoles, there's no built in acceleration for "looking." With a mouse you can move it quickly and stop once you're looking where you want, but with a console controller it just pans at the same speed.

My general rule of thumb is FPS and flight sims for the PC, and racing, sports, and 3rd person shooters for the xBox. Works out pretty well.

I'm never buying another Sony product for the rest of my life because I'm still pissed off about the "memory stick." I'll never forgive you, Sony.

The advantage of the console over the PC is that you know for the 5 year lifespan of that generation of console you will be able to run the games for that console.

With the PC, publishers notoriously lie about the minimum specs needed to run a game just to get you to buy it. So you guy your top of the line gaming PC and it runs all the games that came out the month you bought your PC. Then six months down the line your games download a patch to fix bugs and improve content and now your machine struggles a bit to keep up with the demands. Then another six months and you can completely forget about buying any current games because your ancient 1 year old video card is ridiculously underpowered and obsolete everything in your PC is woefully inadequate for running current games and needs to be upgraded. Repeat every year. And then between your software updates and hardware updates suddenly the old games you used to love no longer work on your machine because the new version of Direct X or some other driver is no longer backwards compatible with the old stuff.

I have a Gamecube. It still runs every Gamecube game. 10 years from now it will still run every Gamecube game. I have an XBox 360. It runs every Xbox 360 game. 10 years from now it will still run every Xbox game. My windows 7 PC won`t run current generation games worth crap because it`s a little over a year old and now considered obsolete. It also won`t run awesome old games like Interstate `76 because Direct X updates and the operating system are not backwards compatible enough to run the game.

Ghastly:The advantage of the console over the PC is that you know for the 5 year lifespan of that generation of console you will be able to run the games for that console.

With the PC, publishers notoriously lie about the minimum specs needed to run a game just to get you to buy it. So you guy your top of the line gaming PC and it runs all the games that came out the month you bought your PC. Then six months down the line your games download a patch to fix bugs and improve content and now your machine struggles a bit to keep up with the demands. Then another six months and you can completely forget about buying any current games because your ancient 1 year old video card is ridiculously underpowered and obsolete everything in your PC is woefully inadequate for running current games and needs to be upgraded. Repeat every year. And then between your software updates and hardware updates suddenly the old games you used to love no longer work on your machine because the new version of Direct X or some other driver is no longer backwards compatible with the old stuff.

I have a Gamecube. It still runs every Gamecube game. 10 years from now it will still run every Gamecube game. I have an XBox 360. It runs every Xbox 360 game. 10 years from now it will still run every Xbox game. My windows 7 PC won`t run current generation games worth crap because it`s a little over a year old and now considered obsolete. It also won`t run awesome old games like Interstate `76 because Direct X updates and the operating system are not backwards compatible enough to run the game.

You can usually get 3 or more years out of a PC unless you went really cheap when you bought it.

Lsherm:Ghastly: The advantage of the console over the PC is that you know for the 5 year lifespan of that generation of console you will be able to run the games for that console.

With the PC, publishers notoriously lie about the minimum specs needed to run a game just to get you to buy it. So you guy your top of the line gaming PC and it runs all the games that came out the month you bought your PC. Then six months down the line your games download a patch to fix bugs and improve content and now your machine struggles a bit to keep up with the demands. Then another six months and you can completely forget about buying any current games because your ancient 1 year old video card is ridiculously underpowered and obsolete everything in your PC is woefully inadequate for running current games and needs to be upgraded. Repeat every year. And then between your software updates and hardware updates suddenly the old games you used to love no longer work on your machine because the new version of Direct X or some other driver is no longer backwards compatible with the old stuff.

I have a Gamecube. It still runs every Gamecube game. 10 years from now it will still run every Gamecube game. I have an XBox 360. It runs every Xbox 360 game. 10 years from now it will still run every Xbox game. My windows 7 PC won`t run current generation games worth crap because it`s a little over a year old and now considered obsolete. It also won`t run awesome old games like Interstate `76 because Direct X updates and the operating system are not backwards compatible enough to run the game.

You can usually get 3 or more years out of a PC unless you went really cheap when you bought it.

Also, if you don't want to build a virtual machine to run old games on old OSes, Good Old Games has your back: http://www.gog.com/gamecard/interstate76 All they do is port old games to new OSes.

From what I heard the GOG version of Interstate 76 doesn`t run on Windows 7 at all and is very hit and miss on the other post 98 OSs they`ve tried to upgrade it for.

Ghastly:The advantage of the console over the PC is that you know for the 5 year lifespan of that generation of console you will be able to run the games for that console.

With the PC, publishers notoriously lie about the minimum specs needed to run a game just to get you to buy it. So you guy your top of the line gaming PC and it runs all the games that came out the month you bought your PC. Then six months down the line your games download a patch to fix bugs and improve content and now your machine struggles a bit to keep up with the demands. Then another six months and you can completely forget about buying any current games because your ancient 1 year old video card is ridiculously underpowered and obsolete everything in your PC is woefully inadequate for running current games and needs to be upgraded. Repeat every year. And then between your software updates and hardware updates suddenly the old games you used to love no longer work on your machine because the new version of Direct X or some other driver is no longer backwards compatible with the old stuff.

I have a Gamecube. It still runs every Gamecube game. 10 years from now it will still run every Gamecube game. I have an XBox 360. It runs every Xbox 360 game. 10 years from now it will still run every Xbox game. My windows 7 PC won`t run current generation games worth crap because it`s a little over a year old and now considered obsolete. It also won`t run awesome old games like Interstate `76 because Direct X updates and the operating system are not backwards compatible enough to run the game.

I don't have THAT much of a problem with my PCs, but yeah I can understand that. Mostly, I just absolutely cannot shop for PCs again for a while, to avoid the feeling of seeing better parts for the same price you JUST paid a few weeks ago.

Ghastly:The advantage of the console over the PC is that you know for the 5 year lifespan of that generation of console you will be able to run the games for that console.

With the PC, publishers notoriously lie about the minimum specs needed to run a game just to get you to buy it. So you guy your top of the line gaming PC and it runs all the games that came out the month you bought your PC. Then six months down the line your games download a patch to fix bugs and improve content and now your machine struggles a bit to keep up with the demands. Then another six months and you can completely forget about buying any current games because your ancient 1 year old video card is ridiculously underpowered and obsolete everything in your PC is woefully inadequate for running current games and needs to be upgraded. Repeat every year.

Not true- My PC i put together in 09. It has a Core I 7 processor and 12 GB ram and runs everything I can throw at it. I've upgraded the video card once- try doing that on your console. I have no doubt this machine will continue to play any game i want for the next 4 years at least.

Consoles are closed systems that have built in obsolescence. Any decent PC can be upgrade many times to support higher demands.

Mentat:Dinki: Consoles are closed systems that have built in obsolescence. Any decent PC can be upgrade many times to support higher demands.

And that means what to the average non-technical user?

Consoles don't need to be upgraded, that's the point. Technical user or non technical it doesn't matter. You buy your console it runs your games. You buy your PC and you have to play the upgrade game because PCs tend to run unoptimized code that require you to have the latest specs in order to play anything.

Relatively Obscure:GAT_00: What the hell can you power with a 150W power supply? I've got 1100W in mine.

150W is BEYOND low for anything pretending to be "high end," but having 1100W isn't exactly the same as needing or benefiting from it.

I think I had gotten the extra power in case it was needed for mods I've never made. That, or it was basically the same cost as a smaller power supply that couldn't quite do everything, I can't remember.

I once tried using a PC - it was an absolute nightmare! (those who create these various versions don't exactly make them for the novice; they wrongly assume EVERYONE is a Geek) And using it was WORSE!!! Besides, I've ALWAYS used XBox, and it's too late to teach this old dog new tricks. And when PCs become as easy to use as XBox, games are as easy to load into PC as it is for XBox, and there's Halo 2 ported to PC (or better still, XBox games are compatible with PC), THEN I'll use it And You PC-ers DARE to accuse Bill Gates of being the 'Antichrist'?! At least he makes his game consoles EASY to buy & use!!!

Mr. Fuzzypaws:I'd rather wait 10 minutes for a game to install on my Playstation then spend an hour tracking down drivers. At least I can do it unattended and do something productive while I wait, like whack off or something.

You can't whack off while installing drivers? Just goes to show: consoles are for amateurs. PCs are for pros, bros.

Ghastly:Lsherm: Ghastly: The advantage of the console over the PC is that you know for the 5 year lifespan of that generation of console you will be able to run the games for that console.

With the PC, publishers notoriously lie about the minimum specs needed to run a game just to get you to buy it. So you guy your top of the line gaming PC and it runs all the games that came out the month you bought your PC. Then six months down the line your games download a patch to fix bugs and improve content and now your machine struggles a bit to keep up with the demands. Then another six months and you can completely forget about buying any current games because your ancient 1 year old video card is ridiculously underpowered and obsolete everything in your PC is woefully inadequate for running current games and needs to be upgraded. Repeat every year. And then between your software updates and hardware updates suddenly the old games you used to love no longer work on your machine because the new version of Direct X or some other driver is no longer backwards compatible with the old stuff.

I have a Gamecube. It still runs every Gamecube game. 10 years from now it will still run every Gamecube game. I have an XBox 360. It runs every Xbox 360 game. 10 years from now it will still run every Xbox game. My windows 7 PC won`t run current generation games worth crap because it`s a little over a year old and now considered obsolete. It also won`t run awesome old games like Interstate `76 because Direct X updates and the operating system are not backwards compatible enough to run the game.

You can usually get 3 or more years out of a PC unless you went really cheap when you bought it.

Also, if you don't want to build a virtual machine to run old games on old OSes, Good Old Games has your back: http://www.gog.com/gamecard/interstate76 All they do is port old games to new OSes.

From what I heard the GOG version of Interstate 76 doesn`t run on Windows 7 at all and is very hit and miss o ...

I can't speak to Interstate 76, but I downloaded Flat Out from them and it runs fine on Windows 8 and Windows 7. Hell, I even got the original Homeworld to run on my Windows 8 box by setting compatability mode to Windows 98, and that was with the original disc.

jake_lex:Shostie: I don't think anyone who buys a console wants it to out-perform a PC. They just want a machine they can play games on without a whole lot of hassle.

This. I don't want to buy a game, get it home, and discover my computer's video card is out of date after I've opened the box, thus making it impossible for me to return the software.

If your video card is more than six months old, it's out of date. But how old would it have to be to not run a new release at all? Pretty goddamned old for the most part. PC games are set up to run on a spectrum of hardware, from barely running on the minimum spec, to smooth as butter with all of the pretty turned on at the bleeding edge. Just read the box, and you'll generally be fine. And isn't the occasional hardware upgrade part of the fun?

Consoles are fine for the vast majority of games but there are certain types of games that you really need a PC to get the most out of - I think if I tried to play a Civ game with a PS3 controller I would lose my mind. Also some games just feel right on a PC platform (most recent example I can think of is XCom:Enemy Unknown). PS3 demo left me kinda meh but playing the PC version just felt like I was home